RavensDagger

  Chapter Sixty-One - Warded

  Just barging into a magically warded room with no preparation or thought was, generally speaking, a dumb idea.

  I hadn't lived as long as I had doing dumb things, and so I was very much tempted to call this entire mission off as Alyssa poked and prodded at the door.

  I didn't, however. Mostly because she was a somewhat competent mage.

  Working with mages and magicians and kineticists and wizards was always a risky bit of business. People who stared past the physical world and into the space beyond that tended to be... skewed. Still, that didn't mean that they couldn't be professionals.

  Alyssa, for all of her youth and brash attitude, struck me as one such person. I didn't think she'd come into her art as a professional, however. The way she did things reminded me of Sharp, in a way. She acted as though she had been trained to act that way.

  It came in the way her spells were practiced, in the confident way she read into what magic she saw. At the moment, she was reaching into a pocket to pull out a small pouch that looked like it was filled with sand, and she did so with the ease of long practice.

  Most younger folk didn't bother practicing mundane skills reted to their discipline until they were second nature like that.

  I watched as she spilled salt onto the ground, the scent in the air telling me what she was dealing with.

  Alyssa then touched the door and muttered an incantation, and soon enough she slumped down.

  Jenny pced a hand on her shoulder, keeping her steady. "You good?" the shorter woman asked.

  "I'm fine," Alyssa said. "Just, give me a moment. This is a complicated one, but we're so close... we'll have time to rest ter."

  Jenny nodded, then returned to scanning the room. Every sound we made, sniffles, shoes scuffing on the floor, or words spoken in a low whisper, echoed through the rge space in an eerie way.

  Alyssa took a deep breath, then refocused. A glow suffused the door, then a form shifted out of it. A moth, as rge around as a person's head. It gently glided down, then alighted onto the pile of salt and disappeared.

  The salt... melted down, tumbling away and spreading out into a circle with spaces marked out within it. It continued to move, and after a long minute, there was a complex diagram written on the floor.

  "Okay," Alyssa said. "We're dealing with something pretty standard. There's a barrier that goes off if you tamper with the door directly, another set of arms for magical tampering, and... this one here looks like it explodes outwards if you try to force the door open." She pointed to various parts of the diagram.

  "Fun," Jenny said. "Can we open it?"

  "Yeah," Alyssa said. "I mean. Yes. This is old stuff. Solved a long time ago. I can unlock the vault door, but I might not be able to stop all of the arms linked into this bit of spellwork."

  "What does that mean?" Sharp asked. She'd been pretty quiet, staring at the diagram and the magic as it unfolded.

  "It means that as soon as I break the lock, we'll have seconds to act before the arm goes off," Alyssa said. "And I have no idea what that arm will do, only that it exists and is linked to the door."

  Jenny hummed, then scanned the room. She pulled out a smartphone, turning on its fshlight to scan the ceiling. "No turret empcements. I didn't notice any traps on the way over. Could be that the arm is just a signal. And with the master of this pce being dead as doornails, we might be okay."

  "Might be?"

  "Let's be fast, then!" Sharp said. I think she just said it to override any of the very sensible objections I had.

  My main concern was that Alyssa and Jenny were being rather cagey about what exactly, we were here to grab, and what we might find in this vault. I had some guesses, but nothing concrete to go off of.

  "Ready?" Alyssa asked.

  "Yeah," Jenny said.

  Sharp stepped to the side, then brought her shotgun up to her shoulder in the same pose we'd practiced at the range. "Go ahead," she said.

  Alyssa touched the handle, then yanked the vault door open in one smooth motion. Sharp and Jenny tensed, aiming into the room that was only lit by Jenny's light.

  It was... a small room with a few shelves along the walls and a couple of long tables. The space wasn't much bigger than the average public washroom, with furniture that looked like it had been bought from one of those 'assemble it yourself' stores.

  On said furniture were a few items, but mostly books.

  "Looks clear," Alyssa said. "There, that's the one." she was pointing right across the room, where a rge tome sat all alone on one of the tables. It was bck, bound leather with a bit of golden gilding on the sides. The kind of thing that was needlessly expensive and pretty, but exactly the sort of thing an ostentatious mage would be attracted to.

  She crossed the room, and we followed.

  I was looking for trouble, but didn't find any in the knick-knacks resting on the tables. There were wands and foci, more books, and a few jars with samples of unidentifiable stuff in them, but nothing that jumped out to me as actively dangerous.

  Alyssa's hand hovered over the book for a moment before she nodded. "Safe," she said before grabbing it. "Jenny, bag."

  "Got it," Jenny said as she pulled out a crumpled pstic bag and swished it open. The two managed to slip the tome into it.

  Meanwhile, Sharp was looking around. There were items here that might be worth something, but I wasn't going to let her just grab anything. Except... "Can I have that?" she asked, pointing to one of the books.

  Alyssa looked over, then blinked. "Uh... sure, let me check it."

  The book Sharp had pointed to was rather small. A palm-sized paperback, well-read and with a few bits of paper sticking out from between its dogeared pages. Alyssa picked it up, then handed it to Sharp. "Thanks!" she said.

  I finally got a good look at the title. Magic for Newbies.

  Well... yes, I supposed that was a good pick. And it looked like something that wouldn't be worth setting any sort of magical trap on.

  "Guys, let's move," Jenny said.

  We moved, though not without compints. "You know, when I agreed to help, I expected to get some sort of reward out of this," Sharp said. "Not... just one small book."

  "We agreed to pay you a thousand dolrs, that's not nothing," Alyssa said. "Besides, this has been a cakewalk, no danger, no--"

  "Trouble," Jenny interrupted.

  My fur climbed to stand on end at the word, and I perked my ears up to listen better. There was something moving. Something small but retively fast... no, multiple somethings, and from the faint electrical whine, they weren't organic.

  The first of them came rolling out around the far end of the room, out of one of the adjoining corridors.

  It was a drone. It rose to meet Sharp's waist in height, with four tractor-like treads and a boxy metal body. The unit had a set of sensors on its front, which was fine. The turreted gun atop it was not.

  "Shit," Jenny said. She raised her handgun and took three quick, loud shots that echoed through the room. The first two struck the robot centre-mass, the st cracked into one of the walls behind.

  The moment she fired, an arm started to bre, and the emergency lighting came on.

  The bot Jenny had shot veered off to the side and ran into a wall, incapacitated. So, nothing too strong.

  Cheap, AI-operated security drones like that were a dime a dozen. They carried small arms, and could recognize people with a good-enough ratio of accurate identification. They usually went down in a couple of hits. Not even necessarily bullet hits either. Someone with a bat and some enthusiasm could take one out.

  But in bulk, they sold for about three or four thousand a piece, and even an enthusiastic bat-wielder would hesitate after seeing a dozen gun-toting drones wheeling their way.

  Another came out of a corridor to our left. Jenny took a few more shots, then Sharp levelled her shotgun and tore the machine's side off with a spray of buckshot.

  "Time to move!" Jenny shouted, and she was right. I could hear a few more coming, and these things were usually networked together. They'd start by investigating, then if met with violence, would adopt a 'shoot-first' kind of stance.

  We weren't bullet-proof enough to handle that.

  And so we finally had an excuse to put all that cardio I'd been pushing Sharp into to the test.

  ***